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AMD Says It's 'Ambidextrous,' Hints It May Offer ARM Chips
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Today at its Financial Analyst Day, AMD made statements that strongly suggest it plans to offer ARM-based chips alongside its x86 CPUs and APUs. According to coverage of the event, top executives including CEO Rory Read talked up an 'ambidextrous' approach to instruction-set architectures. One executive went even further: 'She said AMD will not be "religious" about architectures and touted AMD's "flexibility" as one of its key strategic advantages for the future.' The roadmaps the execs showed focused on x86 offerings, but it seems AMD is overtly setting the stage for a collaboration with ARM."
It's a tough question. The Intel Atom has an edge on ARM, but it's not a big one, and while a high-performance ARM chip costs below $20, the Atom is significantly more. On the other hand, right now there are no ARM implementations that are really competitive on the PC front, and probably won't be until ARMv8 (64-bit) chips, or at least until Cortex-A15. A15 chips will probably come out in late 2012 and be a bit faster than the Atom, but a long way from Sandy Bridge and the other current Intel designs.
AMD lost its fabs a while ago. (Their fabs are part of GlobalFoundries now, and they're a bit ahead of TSMC, but not anywhere close to Intel in terms of process capabilities.)
The price tag is directly comparable, because ARM doesn't make processors, they sell licenses to designs. The only relevant metric is really performance at a given power point.
The closest competitor is Intel's Atom chips. At comparable power points, the current ARM chips seem to substantially outperform Atom chips, and the ARM chips scale far lower than Intel's do. It becomes a bit murkier at higher power levels, since until recently nobody was really making ARM chips that high, but we'll see a lot more competition in this field in the future with the ARM Cortex A15, which is intended to be a lot more scalable. The current design is planned to go from 1.0GHz single-core, up to 2.5GHz eight-core, depending on what the integrator wants. On top of that, they've got the new Cortex A7 that they've designed as an ultra-lower performance chip, which is intended to be a much simpler architecture that's still ISA-compatible with the A15. The intention is actually to put an A7 and A15 in the same SoC, so that the SoC can entirely turn off the A15 cores when only low performance is needed (like playing audio or video, since that's done almost entirely on a DSP). This is similar to what nVidia did with the Tegra 3, just taken even farther.
AIUI ARM do HDL design of processor cores, then they pass that HDL on to other companies who make complete chip designs based on it. Those companies in turn pass the designs onto fabs (which may be in-house or external) for manufacture. IIRC some vendors also do their own HDL work and only license the basic architectural design from ARM.
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